14 DAY TRIAL // After Katie Holmes filed for divorce from Tom Cruise and the proceedings were finalized in only a few weeks, celebrity magazines started keeping tabs on the actor to see how much time he’d spend with his daughter Suri. He’s now suing one of them for alleging that said amount of time actually spelled “abandonment.”
A rep for Cruise said back in October last year that he’d be taking the tab to court over a story claiming that he’d abandoned his daughter, mostly because she was now living with her mother, who, upon filing for divorce, had defected from the Church of Scientology.
Scientology has a reputation of shutting former members out completely, even barring them contact from relatives who remain within the Church, so the tab ran with the assumption that this was happening in Suri and Tom Cruise’s case as well.
Not really, Tom explains in a deposition obtained by Radar Online. He’s suing the tab seeking $50 million (€36.9 million) in damages, and goes to great lengths to demolish the magazine’s biggest “argument,” namely that he hadn’t been photographed with Suri as much as before, hence “abandonment.”
“Prior to my divorce in June 2012, my family, including my daughter, Suri, often traveled to my foreign motion picture sets for visits. These visits allowed me to see my daughter while fulfilling my obligations to my work, my colleagues, and the studios that hire me,” Cruise writes.
“During June 2012 through December 2012, I worked on two back-to-back film projects overseas, in Iceland and the United Kingdom. During this same period, Suri lived in New York with my ex-wife and was enrolled in school there,” he adds.
Obviously, because he and Katie were not living together and were in different parts of the world, one of them had to sacrifice themselves and spend less time with Suri, or else she would have been traveling back and forth to see them both for equal amounts of time.
Cruise hints that he was the one who gave up on this, but from that to saying that he abandoned his child is a giant leap. The magazine should have never taken it.
“I have in no way cut Suri out of my life – whether physically, emotionally, financially or otherwise. While I’m sure my daughter misses me when I am not with her (as I miss her), she is a very happy child, and we have a wonderful relationship and cheerful phone calls,” Cruise continues, explaining how he’s making up for the time he can’t spend with Suri physically.
He’s even willing to provide proof for that, for the fact that he’s very involved in his daughter’s life, writing, “As my numerous emails with Suri’s mother during this time period demonstrate, I was a constant presence in Suri’s life.”
Clearly, Cruise doesn’t need that kind of money so he’s not suing because of that, but rather to make a point. While he never takes issues with tabloid reports on his involvement with Scientology – and there are more than plenty of those! –, he is determined to shut down this rumor regarding his relationship with his daughter once and for all.